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Too Specific and Too Vague

Bee Wilson: Curry House Curry, 24 March 2022

Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionised Food in America 
by Mayukh Sen.
Norton, 259 pp., £18.99, January, 978 1 324 00451 6
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The Philosophy of Curry 
by Sejal Sukhadwala.
British Library, 106 pp., £10, March, 978 0 7123 5450 9
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... gave Indian cookery demonstrations for the next thirty years. American newspapers called him ‘King of the Curry Chefs’. In the early 1970s in New York, Sahni found, according to Sen, that ‘Americans could seemingly understand Indian food only through the framework of curry.’ Sahni, who was born in 1945, learned to cook as a child in the north Indian ...

Mohocks

Liam McIlvanney: The House of Blackwood, 5 June 2003

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era 
by David Finkelstein.
Pennsylvania State, 199 pp., £44.95, April 2002, 0 271 02179 9
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... and that Scott was ‘a tame and feeble writer’. Unluckily, in the same article, an Irish MP – Richard Martin – was twitted as a ‘jackass’: he wrote instantly to William Blackwood, threatening legal action and demanding that the article’s author be unmasked. A distraught Wilson took to his bed and snivelled to Blackwood: ‘To own that article is ...

‘I was such a lovely girl’

Barbara Newman: The Songs of the Medieval Troubadours, 25 May 2006

Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours 
translated by Ezra Pound, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Kehew, edited by Robert Kehew.
Chicago, 280 pp., £35, May 2005, 0 226 42933 4
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Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads and Carols 
edited by John Hirsh.
Blackwell, 220 pp., £17.99, August 2004, 1 4051 1482 7
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An Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman’s Song 
edited by Anne Klinck.
Palgrave, 208 pp., £19.99, May 2004, 9781403963109
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... got the knife. (Snodgrass) The unlikely Monk of Montaudon, who was ostensibly commanded by his king ‘to eat meat, court women, sing and write poetry’, composed this delightfully unmonastic verse: I love it when, in t he summer season, I rest down where the water burbles – The meadow’s green, the flowers pleasing, The sweet birds practising their ...

Top of the World

Jenny Turner: Douglas Coupland, 22 June 2000

Miss Wyoming 
by Douglas Coupland.
Flamingo, 311 pp., £9.99, February 2000, 0 00 225983 4
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... how artificial a construct it is, it has warning bells built in. The central characters are called Richard and Karen; Karen is very, very thin; she takes one diet pill too many and is visited by aliens. And so on. Names, chapter-titles, bits of dialogue and even the central plot concept in this most crashingly earnest of novels are also the most frivolous of ...

Michael Gove recommends …

Robert Hanks: Dennis Wheatley, 20 January 2011

The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley 
by Phil Baker.
Dedalus, 699 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 903517 75 8
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... Van Ryn, a brash, genial American multimillionaire, and the comparatively colourless Englishman Richard Eaton, supposedly a self-portrait. The plot (a hunt for tsarist treasure, a Bolshevik scheme for world domination – plus a bit of romance) is a helter-skelter mess. Wheatley liked to talk about his ‘snakes and ladders’ technique: in effect, a ...

My Dagger into Yow

Ian Donaldson: Sidney’s Letters, 25 April 2013

The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney 
edited by Roger Kuin.
Oxford, 1381 pp., £250, July 2012, 978 0 19 955822 3
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... a letter to Walsingham in London, requesting ‘favor and help’ for the bearer, one ‘Richard Smythe, hir Maiesties old servant’, now fallen on hard times. Three weeks later, when the bullet wound in his thigh had turned gangrenous, he died in Arnhem with a touching but still unsent letter by his bedside, addressed in Latin to his friend the ...

This is America, man

Michael Wood: ‘Treme’ and ‘The Wire’, 27 May 2010

The Wire 
created by David Simon.
HBO/2002-2008
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Treme 
created by Eric Overmyer and David Simon.
HBO/April
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... the wrong person as it happens, but he is right to fear. Enter Marlo Stanfield, the cool and evil king of the drug world in the later parts of the series. He seems to be alone, but Joe knows the visit isn’t good news. ‘I treated you like a son,’ Joe says. Marlo replies, with an indifference that amounts almost to kindness, ‘Wasn’t meant to play the ...

Flossing

Andrew O’Hagan: Pukey poetry anthologies, 4 November 2004

Poems to Last a Lifetime 
edited by Daisy Goodwin.
HarperCollins, 308 pp., £18.99, October 2004, 0 00 717707 0
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All the Poems You Need to Say I Do 
edited by Peter Forbes.
Picador, 197 pp., £10, October 2004, 0 330 43388 1
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... used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many readers accepted would do for the time being. In what my headmaster used to call the interim period, self-help books have taken over the world, which is fast becoming a place where no one is safe from the threat of their own ...

Coruscating on Thin Ice

Terry Eagleton: The Divine Spark, 24 January 2008

Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins 
by Peter Conrad.
Thames and Hudson, 529 pp., £24.95, September 2007, 978 0 500 51356 9
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... transparency; but he was also quick to see how cults of mystery were exploited by both priest and king to legitimate their power. There is no reason to assume that artists have been immune to this vice. The fact is that there is also something elusive and opaque about fine cooking or magnificent tennis-playing. Heston Blumenthal probably has no more idea of ...

Opprobrious Epithets

Katrina Navickas: The Peterloo Massacre, 20 December 2018

Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre 
by Jacqueline Riding.
Head of Zeus, 386 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 1 78669 583 3
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... and imprisoned leaders of reform societies and printers of the radical press. ‘Church and King’ was the watchword of magistrates and manufacturers, who employed spies to root out any evidence of radical sympathies. After 1815 a new generation of local activists began to campaign alongside veterans of the earlier struggle. Reform societies organised ...

Let’s go to Croydon

Jonathan Meades, 13 April 2023

Iconicon: A Journey around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain 
by John Grindrod.
Faber, 478 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 571 34814 5
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... the paving stones? Architecture will get it sorted. As Reinier de Graaf noted of a speech by Richard Rogers: ‘With each new sentence a new location, topic or domain is added to the theoretical competence of architecture.’Denise Scott Brown, overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert ...

All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... rest of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story ...
... barefoot or otherwise. I then went to see K. B. McFarlane. My special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David ...

Vertiginous

Nicholas Penny, 12 December 1996

Grands Décors français 1650-1800 
by Bruno Pons.
Faton, 439 pp., £130, June 1995, 2 87844 023 4
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The Rococo Interior 
by Katie Scott.
Yale, 342 pp., £39.95, November 1995, 0 300 04582 4
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Chardin 
by Marianne Roland Michel, translated by Eithne McCarthy.
Thames and Hudson, 293 pp., £60, March 1996, 0 500 09259 1
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... often incorporated not only heraldic devices but hyperbolic allusions to their patron (the Sun King at Versailles, most famously). But it is not clear how seriously these allusions were taken. Scott herself notes how contemporary accounts of ballets performed at court and of statuary arranged in the palace gardens ignored the political meanings that we now ...

Hayek and His Overcoat

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 October 1998

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations 
by David Landes.
Little, Brown, 650 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 316 90867 3
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The Commanding Heights 
by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw.
Simon and Schuster, 457 pp., £18.99, February 1998, 0 684 82975 4
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... there would be inflation. One must wait for economies to right themselves. (‘Is it your view,’ Richard Kahn asked Hayek when he came to Cambridge to explain his theory in 1931, ‘that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply. Keynes, although he greatly disliked Hayek’s argument, saw ...

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